"Cocky" drug dealer caught in town hotel

Saturday 27 January 2018

A Jersey-born drugs dealer with an "unenviable" criminal record who was caught running his business from a local hotel room has been sent to prison for 20 months.

The Royal Court was told 27-year-old William Cowling first got into trouble with the police when he was just 12 years old.

By the time he was 20 he’d been charged 30 times, and to date he’s faced more than 40 charges – about a quarter of them drugs-related. His defence lawyer Advocate Julian Gollop described him as a "cocky" character who in the past had accepted doing time as a way of life, but that that had now changed. He was a "man in need of help", who wanted to mend his ways. Advocate Gollop asked the Court to give him one last chance.

The Court was told Police Officers in a patrol car spotted Cowling acting suspiciously in La Colomberie late one night in September last year. When they called him over he ran off. They gave chase into a nearby hotel, but Cowling temporarily gave them the slip. They later found him in one of the corridors and arrested him. He smelled of cannabis. When he was searched he was found to have more than £500 in cash and a mobile phone, which seemed to be "ringing constantly."

Police also searched the hotel. A wash bag and a training shoe were found near the fire escape where Cowling had last been spotted. More than £3,000 in cash was found hidden in the bag, and various tablets in the shoe. It’s estimated the two packages of ethylphenidate – a pyscho-active drug rarely found in the island – hidden in the training shoe had a street value of up to £16,000.

When police searched the room which Cowling and his girlfriend had booked into for a week, they seized more drugs, drugs paraphernalia, and a number of mobile phones and similar electronic devices. Although Cowling admitted the devices belonged to him, he claimed not to know the necessary PIN numbers. 

The Court heard that the selfies and videos on them not only linked Cowling to drugs activities but seemed to show him benefiting from the profits of his dealing. They captured him on holiday in Amsterdam; taking drugs in the toilet of an airplane; ‘cutting’ drugs with sugar to make them go further; at a buffet at a local hotel with his plate piled high; and in another local hotel "ranting" because there were no roses in the hotel bedroom, something he allegedly always demanded because his girlfriend liked it.

Sentencing Cowling, Deputy Bailiff Tim Le Cocq, said there was no alternative but to send him to prison, because he’d been given one last chance before, and hadn’t taken it.